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Tiger Darrow - Style Scout

Tiger Darrow – Style Scout

Hi friends,

Let’s be cliché for a minute. Let’s think of everyone in the world as an artist. In all honesty, it’s true. Everyone is an artist. To be more specific, we are all painters; that even goes for people who really are within the arts. Musicians, dancers, actors, we are all, in reality, painters. Very, very exceptional painters at that.

When we are born, we are given a blank canvas--a fresh life--to paint whatever picture we see fit. For most of us, we spend the first 17 or 18 years of our lives priming our canvas, most likely with the help of our parents, experimenting with a few dabs of color here and there. By the time we’ve reached 17 or 18, I’d imagine our canvases are beautiful, but lack the complexity and thought that they could have, and certainly haven’t come close to reaching their full potential. It isn’t until we leave the comfort and safety of our own homes that we discover how to use the paints of the situations we encounter. This is also when our canvas becomes somewhat more of a physical canvas. Something more tactile.

The Dorm Room:
The first instance of a tactile canvas for many of us is a dorm room. In a whirlwind of excitement and adrenaline on move-in day at college, students walk in to their new home and are smacked right in the face with a bare, white room. At least, that was the situation in my case. The bed, desk, and set of drawers were the only “pop of color” in the room: a light, but very bulky and masculine-looking brown. The walls were pure cinderblock painted white, and it looked like there was no hope for an inspirational thought to survive in the room. Until suddenly, the room was no longer seen as a bland dorm room, but rather a blank canvas. The walls are now painted with photos from home, posters from movies and TV shows, decals that were bought on sale from Pier 1 and something else that really makes a difference: cute bed spreads. I got lucky. My roommate and I have similar taste and both got our bedding at Anthropologie--a total coincidence. She and I also have a goal to try to not have any white space on the walls by the end of the years. If you have to spend most of your time in this room, you have to like it! It’ll probably end up evolving throughout the year, too. Ours definitely has.

Dorm Room 1

An Idea:

I didn’t like the boring white I had to stare at on the backs of my shelves, so I expanded a high resolution image of my favorite city in Spain (Toledo) on Photoshop and printed it out in sections to create my own version of shelf-paper so I’d have a prettier backdrop! I didn’t measure how much space I needed to cover before printing, so it took me a long time, and I printed out more than necessary, so if you choose to do something like this, I recommend getting to be friends with a tape measure first!

Dorm Room 2

On note-taking:

Staying awake in certain classes can be a challenge. Even if you find the topic at hand interesting or if you have a great professor, it can still be difficult to stay alert. However, one solution that could save you from dozing off is trying a different note taking technique. Notebook paper is possibly the most obvious canvas you have, so try taking advantage of it.

Dorm Room 3

This is boring.

Dorm Room 4

This is better!

Getting Around the Rules:

Lots of colleges won’t let you put holes in the walls or ceilings (and unfortunately, you can’t really sneak around that rule--they check your rooms), but hanging things is alright. If you’re a girl, you’ll often want a full length mirror so you can check your entire outfit before leaving the room. In our case, we couldn’t hang the mirror on the door to the bathroom because there was no room between the door and the door frame. How did we get around it? We hung it from a pipe! Works just as well, and there was no drilling involved.

Dorm Room 5

Hiding Clutter:

Closets can look cluttered (especially a college student’s closet) and to save space, there usually isn’t a door on the closet in a dorm room. To hide our closets a little, my roommate and I used some cheap curtains from K-Mart and a plain, white tension rod.

Dorm Room 6

More Storage:

To create more room for storage, get bed risers! I have a lot of instruments I took to college with me, and I needed to store guitar cases under my bed, so these risers helped out a lot. The width might not always be an exact fit for the room (I had to move my desk completely and push it on top of my risers, because the base stuck out a little too much), but you’ll be grateful for the extra space.

Dorm Room 7

Another Benefit:

Risers also leave room for bins under your bed. I use 3 canvas boxes from Bed Bath and Beyond to store tights, underwear, and socks under my bed. This saves room in my chest of drawers for more t-shirts and pants.

Dorm Room 8

Learning how to share a space if you haven’t done it already and figuring out how to keep yourself organized can be a little overwhelming at first, but once you get the hang of it, it becomes a game and everything you buy as an organizational aid or as an embellishment to your room becomes a treasure. You appreciate it because it is a sign of your independence and your first splash of color on a new canvas.

Until next time,
Tiger

Posted: November 16, 2011

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